Of Consummation
by Aenigmatic
Summary: Vignette: Experimental writing that describes the journey through the mirror to the unmasking.


**Author's Note: **

_More experimental and somewhat figurative and symbolic writing after 'Air', paralleling the bloom of the rose when Erik brings Christine through the mirror. Characters are a mix of Kay and ALW – with great liberty taken, of course. Hmm…I confess to being a Kay fan here, other than Midasgirl and seriously don't quite find Leroux inspiring actually (*ducks* it does seem that no one quite agrees with me here). _

_This vignette, as I said, is unashamedly, unapologetically Erik/Christine centred (something which I've always itched to do) – you have been warned. _

_On a lighter note, Merry Christmas to all and a Happy New Year._

**Of Consummation**

_Christine…_

She dipped him in the valley of blackest despair when she soared through her gala triumph – glistening evidence of happiness staining the hollow of her cheeks witnessed by many, and he, alone in his growing grief.

Beneath the shield of fairy tales, lay the innocence of a child embedded within an angelic voice, which only discerned beauty amidst ubiquitous ugliness. 

Till then she knew him only as a ghost, a myth and finally a voice, the fulfilment of her father's mythical sayings. The myths that the angel recaptured for her and made it live, stirring the unconscious, surreptitious devotion of a lifeline. 

The wafting note was pregnant with the heavy odour of the richest and the most incomprehensible desire, a sound with a mystic centre beyond her that she unconsciously rose to touch, to grab. Its simple tune twisted, winding into the softest caress around her ankles, lifting to wrap itself tightly around her middle, imprinting the curious burst of rose buds on her cheeks.

An advent of a different kind of wakefulness.

She sat up thickly, straighter than her cumbersome costume allowed, aligning herself with the undulations of the wordless melody, guided by its exceptional pulse of which she ravenously drank, and which drank her. It seemed as if tonight was different; the air was doubly charged with his overwhelming presence…strange, that she had not noticed its overpowering nature before…

_Christine…_

The plea of an angel, the disharmonious, brief thump of reality, and the lissome plunge into ecstasy contained in that single utterance. And there was in her fascination, no worldly care left, no sublime urge for falling, for she had already fallen, or so it seemed, into the breathtaking web of his virtuoso voice, the indigenous music of the heavens that bypassed many but speared her. In the roiling soil of her imagination, fiendish fertility smiled on the appearing rhizome; it stretched foolishly and wiggled out of proportion, an elongated rupture of a single, dark red bud.

_I am your angel of music. _

His command was elucidated; the unexpectedness of her adoring response rendering him momentarily speechless. She was yoked to his mystery, a bondage to his vibrant sensuality and passionate devotion. 

_Come to me._

The mirror separating the contradicting worlds of darkness and light turned soundlessly on its pivot and she flew her maiden, naive flight into pithy sightlessness, reliving toddling, tentative steps when distance was infinite. Flames from a lantern sought counsel within their inner circle, her eyes tracing their upward bounce onto a ghoulish white mask that hid half a face. And there were mismatched eyes, the cynicism of decay and the adoration of perfection that swirled in their deeply insatiable, devouring ovals. 

The angel worshipped the exquisite but still soulless girl with crystalline song germinated from a bottomless purity squeezed from depthless despair. A tear fell, a devotee on pilgrimage down the exposed, pale cheek. 

She never noticed his tears, nor did he intend her to. Instead, graceful manoeuvres led her ever downwards and she finally saw a lake…and a finely crafted boat, filled with silken cushions and carelessly strewn red roses, all in their various stages of bloom. 

The splashes of fragrance from his burgeoning melody intoxicated the young soprano – his tune begotten of ecstasy that appeared to flow effortlessly from a sylvan world of birds and trees; he now poured but a fraction of his rippling passion to his receiver.

Charon poled with leisure, his strokes upon the water aligning exhilarating passion and mounting pleasure. In that moment, that solitary being was her only saviour, her only existence, her obsessive guardian. 

But she could not have known, that his salvation loomed close as well, a salvation borne of a rose madly in bloom.

In the realm of self-imposed shadows, powerful stabs of emotions – that he had promised himself never to feel anymore – roared traitorously awake and flung the festering seed of deception on contaminated ground. His magnificent muse had collapsed and now slept, drenched with the hypnotic lull of his fading hum. Her loveliness undid him; with sorrowful recognition he knew he could not sully her…the tight clench of his fists projected its restraining order on his arms. Her delicious weight to savour when she fell into him had passed. Now she slept in verdant satiation, her breaths softly sighing as he lamented the perennial. 

Extremity was carried within him…how did hope and despair co-exist so tightly; how could a dead face be the cruel exterior of the extraordinary gifts that he had been given?

In his overwhelming need and unfulfilled longing, music answered with its siren lure. He needed song…he suddenly needed song to sustain the living, brittle dream; he needed melodies that flowed from sweet music's throne to conceal the ramifications of his unforgivable actions – they would be dealt with later – should he decide to assign latitude to the habitual, deepening well of remorse. 

The glorious night passed as a dream, sustained only by the constant throbbing that came from the culmination of arias. 

Time dropped abruptly away when his fingers swept the organ keys; the weeping angel rode the endless torrents of release, bound by polarities of vision, inflamed as a desirous red rose bud demanded it to be…

Wretched want arose in the one who had just awakened with the acute longing to gaze into a golden face that needed to match that excellent voice – had it been too beautiful that the angel needed to hide it? 

The angel paid no heed. The surge of song consumed and annihilated all who dared to tread its staves and he surrendered briefly…before the encounter with a Pandora calibrated both their fairytales. 

The half-mask now lay in the tiny hand and slowly, before her incredulous eyes, the angel took the shape of a man – frightful in appearance, always darkly clad, the outward manifestation of a charred soul that nevertheless refused any relinquishment of all forms of beauty. 

_Erik…my name is Erik…_

He wept, and she did notice his tears this time, but could not yet recognise his mourn for that precious rose, the delicate bloom that had been cast into the flames. 

-Fin-   



End file.
